The former chief strategist for left-wing billionaire George Soros has joined Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in an effort to push amnesty for America’s illegal immigrants, Bloomberg reports.

Stanley Druckenmiller, who Bloomberg reports served as Soros's “chief strategist” for “more than 10 years” as a client money manager, has joined Zuckerberg’s efforts at FWD.us to push for comprehensive immigration reform.

Druckenmiller served as the lead portfolio manager for Soros’ Quantum Fund from 1988 until 2000. According to Bloomberg, he “produced average annual returns of 30 percent at his hedge fund Duquesne Capital Management LLC” from 1986 through 2010.

In addition to hiring Druckenmiller, Zuckerberg funds former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour’s “Americans for a Conservative Direction.” According to the New York Times, that group has been one of the many special interests at the forefront of trying to push conservatives in the House of Representatives to support a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. The Times wrote recently that Barbour’s Zuckerberg-funded group “has been running ads in Iowa lately that implore those watching to ‘stand with Marco Rubio to end de facto amnesty.'”

The Mexican government once paid Barbour to lobby on behalf of amnesty for illegal immigrants inside the United States.

Other special interest groups are lobbying for the House to pass an amnesty program, as well.

The American Action Network, a group led by former Minnesota Republican Sen. Norm Coleman, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on television and radio ads pushing the Senate’s immigration bill in the House. Coleman founded the American Action Network with Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign National Finance Committee co-chair Fred Malek. In addition to his various roles in politics, Malek is the founder and chairman of Thayer Lodging Group.

Karl Rove is similarly spending money pushing amnesty. “Certainly the way in which the bill is perceived and Rubio’s own political fortunes are closely entwined,” Steven Law, the president of Rove’s American Crossroads, said a few weeks ago. “Our first priority is to promote and advance immigration reform, and to talk about the ways this advances conservative goals. If we do that we will not only be helping to move legislation, but it will also protect those who stuck their necks out like Rubio.”

Before those special interests started their lobbying and advertising campaigns for amnesty in the House, most of House GOP leadership seemed to brush off the Senate’s bill. After weeks of pressure from these special interests, however, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor will hold a hearing on his version of the “DREAM Act” on Tuesday, an amnesty provision for young illegal immigrants.

Beyond Druckenmiller's role, several Soros-backed groups are involved in the effort to pass amnesty. As Breitbart News has reported, the Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT) and the National Immigration Forum (NIF) are funded by the progressive billionaire.

Mark Zuckerberg runs a giant spy machine in Palo Alto*, California. He wasn’t the first to build one, but his was the best, and every day hundreds of thousands of people upload the most intimate details of their lives to the Internet. The real coup wasn’t hoodwinking the public into revealing their thoughts, closest associates, and exact geographic coordinates at any given time. Rather, it was getting the public to volunteer that information. Then he turned off** the privacy settings.

[**Editor's note: Facebook disputes the notion that it has "turned off" its privacy settings. We have provided a statement from the company at the bottom of this post.]

“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people,” said Zuckerberg after moving 350 million people into a glass privacy ghetto. “That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”

If the state had organized such an information drive, protestors would have burned down the White House. But the state is the natural beneficiary of this new “social norm.” Today, that information is regularly used in court proceedings and law enforcement. There is no need for warrants or subpoenas. Judges need not be consulted. The Fourth Amendment does not come into play. Intelligence agencies don't have to worry about violating laws protecting citizenry from wiretapping and information gathering. Sharing information “more openly” and with “more people” is a step backward in civil liberties. And spies, whether foreign or domestic, are “more people,” too.

Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, knows better than anyone how to exploit holes in the secrecy apparatus to the detriment of American security. His raison d'être is to blast down the walls protecting state secrets and annihilate the implicit bargain, yet even he is frightened by the brazenness of Facebook and other such social networking sites:

Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and their communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to the U.S. intelligence. Facebook, Google, Yahoo — all these major U.S. organizations have built-in interfaces for U.S. intelligence. It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena. They have an interface that they have developed for U.S. intelligence to use.

It’s all there, and the Internet never forgets. But even if the impossible happened and the Internet did somehow develop selective amnesia, in the case of microblogging service Twitter, the Library of Congress has acquired every message ever posted by its two hundred million members. As Jeffrey Rosen wrote in the New York Times:

We’ve known for years that the Web allows for unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and inadvertent indiscretion, but we are only beginning to understand the costs of an age in which so much of what we say, and of what others say about us, goes into our permanent — and public — digital files. The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew to overcome our checkered pasts.

The U.S. government isn't the only institution to notice. Early in the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, soldiers of the social networking generation uploaded to their MySpace profiles pictures of camp life in the war zones. Innocuous photos of troops horsing around in front of tent cities, bunkers, outposts, motor pools, and operations centers circulated freely on what was then described as “a place for friends.”

The U.S. military soon realized that foreign intelligence services, sympathetic to America’s enemies and savvy to the social revolution, could collect these photographs by the thousands and build detailed, full-color maps of American military bases. During the Cold War, this would have required the insertion of first-rate spies, briefcases filled with cash, and elaborate blackmail schemes. In the age of radical transparency, all it would take is a MySpace account to know exactly where to fire the mortar round to inflict maximum damage on the United States.

The Marine Corps confirmed this in a 2009 directive. “These Internet sites in general are a proven haven for malicious actors and content are a particularly high risk due to information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries.” The directive continued, “The very nature of [social networking sites] creates a larger attack and exploitation window, exposes unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage,” putting operational security, communications security, and U.S. military personnel “at an elevated risk of compromise.”

This type of clever thinking on the part of America’s enemies is not unique to this conflict. During the run-up to the Gulf War, foreign intelligence services had a pretty good idea that the U.S. war machine was preparing for its most substantial engagement since Vietnam. The U.S. military recognized a new kind of threat — one that didn’t require foreign intelligence to insert an agent onto every base in the Republic. Open source information could be just as dangerous. Spikes in late-night orders from pizzerias near key military bases and an exceptionally busy parking lot at the Pentagon could tell hostile powers everything they needed to know.

In determining what should remain secret and what should not, the military — like each component of the American secrecy apparatus — is good at overreaction. The default answer: more secrets. To counter the MySpace problem, they banned blogs and social networks. This benefitted base security but killed morale at home. No longer could parents see their young sons and daughters safe — and even happy — in the war zone. All that remained were breathless reports of intense combat on the cable news networks. And while the average supply clerk is probably safer in Baghdad than in Detroit, every parent and spouse saw the same thing: a son or daughter in a flag-draped casket.

In 2010, the Department of Defense revised and consolidated its ad hoc policy on social media. On its official website it declared, “Service members and [Department of Defense] employees are welcome and encouraged to use new media to communicate with family and friends — at home stations or deployed,” but warned, “it’s important to do it safely.”)

Then, in May 2012, Facebook finally went public at a $100 billion valuation. That seemed like it would be the climax to the story, but it wasn't, because despite all the hype, Facebook stock halved by August.

It beat analyst expectations, but didn't have the "whisper" numbers that actual traders were hoping for, and so the stock declined a little.

On the earnings call, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about how he wants to optimize Facebook ads with better targeting.

Zuckerberg's most exciting hint about the future of Facebook was that it might get into video ads. For good measure, he poo-pooed the idea of a Facebook phone.

Woo. Whee.

The truth is, Facebook has become a perfectly good company with solid management and smart, realistic plans for the future.

But its ambitions suddenly seem limited. It's not going to re-invent TV like Apple or put a computer on your face like Google. It's not going to give away smartphones or take the shipping delay out of online shopping like Amazon. It's not even copying all those ideas like Microsoft.

It's just kind of doing its thing. It built a half-baked search engine. It's optimizing ads.

Which is fine! And smart!

But not very dramatic, or that much fun to pay attention to.

So … is the era of Mark Zuckerberg over?

Far before any of us thought it would be?

Influential people in Silicon Valley are already asking.

The biggest voice to do so, so far, is Hunter Walk, a Google/YouTube executive who is perhaps best known for a blog that industry insiders pay very close attention to.

For the past few years, he says, Zuckerberg has held the "most sway" with those types of people.

"He's of the same generation, he dresses like them (or more specifically, they dress like him) and they all want to respect the Hacker's Way. This gets turned into mantras like "the best code wins," and "move fast and break things." From The Social Network some have learned that you should sometimes play loose with the rules and that you need to navigate around or bull through the stupid folks who seek to slow inevitable disruption, whether they be wealthy twins, Harvard administrators or dead weight co-founders."

"But," asks Walk, "have we reached Peak Hoodie?"

"That is, are we past the halfway point on Zuck as main influence for a generation of technologists?"

The thing about the era of Zuckerberg drawing to a close so soon, is that if it really is, no one would be happier about the prospect than Zuckerberg.

He's never been comfortable in the spotlight. It makes him sweat. Literally!

Back then, 19-year-old Zuckerberg wasn't thinking about video ads that could be rolled out by third quarter or bold cost projections that might make analysts unhappy in the short term but would lay the groundwork for the future.

But maybe 28-year-old Zuckerberg isn't thinking about his 19-year-old self.

Maybe he's looking across town at Larry Page, and thinking about what he could do at 38.

Maybe the era of Zuckerberg isn't over. Maybe it's just lying in wait.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveils a new "Graph Search" feature during a press event on Tuesday.

Facebook announced a new "Graph Search" feature on Tuesday that will answer all the questions that the social network's Newsfeed and Timeline do not.

"Today we're going to take a little trip to our roots," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, in making the announcement.

He described Facebook as a huge database before pointing out that "just like a database, you should be able to query it." The Newsfeed answers the question "What's going on?" and Timeline answers "Who is this person?"But what about everything else? We'll be able to answer other questions using something called "Graph Search."

In addition to launching Graph Search, Facebook is also incorporating Microsoft's Bing search results in Facebook searches. (Microsoft owns a 1.6 percent share of Facebook.) Doing search on Facebook has often been an exercise in frustration, and Graph Search may help to change that. Will Graph Search challenge Google? No, but it could be a start to making Facebook's nemesis even more nervous, although Zuckerberg emphasized the new tool is "not Web search."

Graph Search is a privacy-aware search, Zuckerberg said. That means that it only searches content which has been shared with you and that your search results will differ from the search results someone else will see ... even if you enter the same exact queries.

Rosa Golijan / NBC News

Facebook's new Graph Search allows you to search through photos, places, friends, and interests.

You can initially use Graph Search search through people, photos, places, and interests.

For example, let's say you want to play matchmaker for a friend who recently moved to New York City from Germany. You could search for all friends-of-friends who happen to reside in New York City, lived in Germany at some point, and are single. Ta da! You'll have a list of the ideal matches for your pal. Or perhaps you need to find a dentist. You can easily search for dentists who are liked by your friends.

There was a lot of emphasis on privacy and Zuckerberg explained that a message will appear on users' Newsfeeds to remind them that they should review their privacy settings. Even though Graph Search is privacy-conscious, some slightly embarrassing content could always come up and haunt you.

Zuckerberg emphasized that Graph Search is currently a beta product, meaning that it isn't quite perfect just yet.

"Even as an early product, Graph Search is a completely new way for people to get information on Facebook," he says. If you want to start using the new feature, you can sign up for the beta by heading here.

Want more tech news or interesting links? You'll get plenty of both if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on Twitter, subscribing to her Facebook posts, or circling her on Google+.

I am a Cuban programmer living in Toronto, Canada. I also am fluent in three languages: my native Spanish (because I am a Cuban born), English and French. Last year in an interview you gave to Wired Magazine you said, about your mission with facebook you said:

“For me and my colleagues, the most important thing is that we create an open information flow for people”

You also listed, in the same interview, your personal interests as "openness, making things that help people connect and share what's important to them, revolutions, information flow, and minimalism".

I guess you defined very well your own interests as well as mine. I’m glad you did in that way. As you see, we share a lot of personal similarities, at least in our personal life. Of course, I hadn’t achieved the huge professional success you had done though.

I am also a Human Rights activist through internet social networks like Twitter and, of course, Facebook. In both I have a similar account (@jmarloren in Twitter and the same nick in your brand Facebook) in which I spread my messages against tyrannies like Iran, North Korea and my own country, Cuba. I am also a furious oppositor to Hugo Chavez and his network of allies, who only are harvesting with opportunism and corruption the possibilities that Democracy had gave them in all those countries.

Last week, in Havana, Cuba, the regime headed by Fidel Castro’s brother, Raul Castro, had created a brand of your own Facebook. I guess even without your knowledge. Castro’s copycat facebook hasn’t been created to bring “an open information flow for people” as you said in the interview I already mentioned above.

Cuban copycat Facebook even had been brought to light in a meeting with Cuban official bloggers, those who only spread Castro’s point of view and usually use your Facebook and Twitter to spread lies, offenses and to persecute all our independent voices in Cuba. They even didn’t dare to invite our small but very active group of independent bloggers in Cuba, among them the most prominent Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez.

And by the way, let me not forget this, it was sponsored by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Cuba, Bruno Rodriguez, which shows not only who really is acting behind those names in Facebook, Twitter and internet, but also how political biases had influenced the very beginning of that “social network” internationally branded by yourself and now stolen by Castro's regime.

Some Cubans, like me, and many others have been trying to reach you throughout your Twitter account to advice about this topic I guess you should know. But also to let you know that the creation of that copycat Facebook in Cuba is only for Cuban agents: the only ones who have internet connection in Cuba, and their poisoned bias purposes.

Neither Cubans living abroad nor our own citizens in Cuba could open an account in that copycat Facebook. You can guess then who are the ones who are managing and supervising that “network” ( a network of fears?), and who are the ones who are opening accounts there.

The fact they tried to give, originally, the Cuban “social network” the same HTTP sub domain FACEBOOK branded by you showed that it is a violation of the international law, acknowledged by them when they changed as fast they noticed our tweets through Twitter to you, as the ones I sent you today and I quote here:

Originally they use this HTTP removed immediately: facebook.ismm.edu.cu with is a flagrant violation of International Laws. Now, they had acknowledged this HTTP address for the faked Facebook: http://neko.uclv.edu.cu

I hope I will hear you about this very sensible matter to us, and I truly believe to yourself too. After all, nobody wants to be related with tyrannies and tyrants.

lunes, febrero 28, 2011

(CBS) Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been granted a permanent restraining order against the man accused of stalking him, according to a report.
Pradeep Manukonda has claimed he never intended to scare to the Facebook founder, but merely wanted personal advice
According to crime website The Smoking Gun, Zuckerberg had obtained a restraining order against the 31-year-old Manukonda. The face of Facebook accused Manukonda of making unsolicited visits to several Facebook offices and "using language threatening to his personal safety."

"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother" - Albert Einstein

"It is inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible for public office" - H. L. Menken

"I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented" -Elie Wiesel

"Stay hungry, stay foolish" - Steve Jobs

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert , in five years ther'ed be a shortage of sand" - Milton Friedman

"The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less" - Vaclav Havel